
Qass 



Book 






Author 



Title 



Imprint 



i&~<»l»-l 9PO 






T/ie Higher Education 
and Progress 



Orrin Leslie Elliott 



::5M 











THE HIGHER 
EDUCATION 
AND PROGRESS 

ADDRESS AT THE THIRTEENTH 
ANNUAL COMMENCEMENT OF 
THE LELAND STANFORD JUNIOR 
UNIVERSITY, MAY l8TH, 1904 

BY ORRIN LESLIE ELLIOTT 
REGISTRAR OF THE UNIVERSITY 














^ 



STANFORD UNIVERSITY 
PRESS 



eirr 

WRS. WOODROW W1U0H 
WOV. 25. 1^39 



COMMENCEMENT 
ADDRESS 



THE HIGHER EDUCATION 
AND PROGRESS 



THE steady march of material progress 
is one of the most impressive phenom- 
ena in human history. There are some 
lost arts — arts practiced by peoples of a high 
degree of civilization whose names are all but 
forgotten. There has been great destruction 
of the handiwork of man — of his art, his lit- 
erature, his palaces, his monuments, his ac- 
cumulations everywhere. Yet how little of 
material advancement has been lost. Man 
has set himself resolutely to the task of mas- 
tering the world. He has studied its constitu- 
tion, experimented with its forces, uncovered 
its secrets. The results are so familiar, so a 
part of our every day environment, that we 
hardly grasp the marvelous unfolding to 
which the ages bear testimony. From the 
first rude grappling with wind and wave to 
the latest triumphs of wireless telegraphy and 

3 



The Higher Education and Progress 

the modern battleship there is comprehended 
an almost infinite advance. From Archimedes 
to Copernicus, from Galileo to Watt and 
Stephenson, from Gutenberg to Morse and 
Bell and the host of inventors and discover- 
ers who have made our later times illustrious, 
there is one continuous record of achievement. 
From a period long antedating the Christian 
era to the beginning of its twentieth century 
there has been no break in this progress. 
What one civilization accomplished another 
inherits. The position reached by one gener- 
ation becomes the starting-point for the next. 
It has been a progress that has ministered to 
the wants of man, making the conditions of 
life ever more agreeable, and leaping ahead 
to open wider and wider avenues of desire. 
It has made luxuries common, brought widely 
separated countries together, provided means 
of travel and rapid communication, im- 
proved dwellings, sanitation, clothing, and 
food. Through its wealth and leisure it has 
reacted upon science and philosophy, art and 
literature, promoting intelligence, refinement, 
and the endless quest for human welfare. 
Butchery and wars of conquest, cruel impris- 
onments, persecution for opinion's sake, op- 
pression of woman — these have waned, while 
the humane virtues in individuals and states, 
4 



The Higher Education and Progress 

the care for others and especially for the 
unfortunate, forbearance, toleration, sym- 
pathy, kindliness, have waxed and diffused 
themselves throughout the civilized world. 
The Brotherhood of Man and the Federation 
of the World are at last brought within the 
range of human vision. 

This picture is a perfectly real one of the 
world in which we live. Who can contem 
plate it without a thrill of pride and exulta- 
tion ? Surely it is a good world in which to 
be and to work. 

Yet this is not all of the picture. It is not 
the part which appeals to many ; and in that 
other part there is enough to make all of us 
pause. Civilization builds our cities, it gives 
us ventilated, electric-lighted, steam-heated 
houses ; but it cuts down our forests and 
turns us from outdoors and independence to 
shops and dependence. It gives us hospitals, 
skilled physicians and surgeons ; it also pro- 
vides the rasped nerves and weakened consti- 
tutions which need them. It brings leisure, 
aesthetic pleasures, wide knowledge, oppor- 
tunities of travel ; but it cute us off from the 
elemental forces. It gives us mental poise, 
nice discrimination, critical taste, but God 
and duty are less real. It gives us wealth and 
the power of wealth, but not always the ability 

5 



The Higher Education and Progress 

to escape from the artificial living, the im- 
moral idleness which wealth invites. Con- 
sider the crass display of riches, the corruption 
in government, the easy tolerance of vice, the 
sordidness of much living. How much has 
this unprecedented material advancement ac- 
complished for the permanent betterment of 
the world ? Have we progressed so far from 
the time of Plato and Socrates ? Is the ideal 
Republic so much nearer realization than it 
was two thousand years ago ? What glad- 
Bomeness there was in Greece ! How free the 
human spirit ! In what an empyrean of 
beauty, art, eloquence, philosophy the Hellen- 
ist exulted ! In Attica art, literature, philos- 
ophy soared to heights which have never been 
outreached. In Rome government was more 
resplendent than the modern world has 
boasted. Yet it is the glory that was Greece 
and the grandeur that was Rome. One after 
another the best of ancient civilizations have 
passed away. Egypt, Babylon, Phoenicia, 
Greece, Carthage, Rome wrote their names 
and placed their monuments upon the splen- 
did heights, but they could not transmit their 
spirit or their genius. Instead of going on to 
greater and greater achievements in beauty, 
in sanity, in right living, — instead of real- 
izing the ideals of Socrates and Plato, the 
6 



The Higher Education and Progress 

Gracchi and Marcus Aurelius, there came 
arrest and decay, the races degenerated, forgot 
virtue and sobriety, lost the sense of beauty 
and holiness, and the sceptre passed away. 

It is such a survey as this which leads to 
the confident philosophy that neither mater- 
ial advancement, nor art, nor philosophy, nor 
culture has any necessary coincidence with 
lasting progress — rather that they arrest 
progress and finally accomplish its overthrow. 
Wealth, culture, refinement are the accompan- 
iments of maturity and matured powers. 
May there not be, for nations as for individ- 
uals, a maturity which is only a stage on 
the way to decay and death ? Other civil- 
izations have had their day ; our turn has 
come. The great Anglo-Saxon race passing 
now out of its virile youth is coming into its 
inheritance of wealth and culture. Even in 
America, latest come to maturity, busied still 
with exploitation, still the land of oppor- 
tunity, the burden of civilization is becoming 
heavy. Wealth and art and culture, the 
choicest products of civilization, center in the 
cities. The cities eat out the virility of the 
race. Continually they must be fed from the 
country, and to this Moloch our youth are 
sacrificed in larger and larger numbers. 
Physical vigor is declining. The power of 

7 



The Higher Education and Progress 

wealth and the mysteries of fortune-getting, 
the sense of dependence brought about by our 
complex industrial situation, the widening 
gulf between classes, the relative success of the 
grafter and the boodler and their comparative 
respectability, the feeling that the rich and 
powerful are not expected to obey inconven- 
ient laws — all tend to hopelessly confuse 
moral values. The reformer has spurts of 
enthusiastic activity and righteous wrath. 
At such times thieves and parasites fare 
badly. But evil is always alert. We mag: 
nanimously succor Cuba, sparing nor life nor 
treasure to set her free. But we find it diffi- 
cult to keep the generous spirit alive. We 
manage, at what cost of labor and effort, 
to keep faith with the Philippine people, serv- 
ing them gladly and ungrudgingly ; but we 
hardly dare hope that the speculator will 
not eventually get the upper hand. We form 
societies, make indefatigable collections, and 
dispatch missionaries to all the dark corners 
of the earth ; but do the best we can, the 
conscienceless trader, for whom no societies 
exist and no collections are made, is first on 
the ground. The White Man's Burden is the 
burden of being white, and nations which 
weep over old oppressions find it easier to 
take a city than to rule their own spirit. The 

8 



The Higher Education and Progress 

material achievements of civilization may be 
heaped up and passed on to succeeding gen- 
erations. Intellectual poise, courtesy, cour- 
age, self-control, virtue, are qualities that can 
not be transmitted. They must be won afresh 
by each individual. Every new generation 
must begin at the beginning ; and luxury and 
easy-going morality are heavy handicaps, im- 
pairing the elementary qualities upon which 
virtue and wisdom must be based, and break- 
ing down the stimulus of environment. 
Wealth we can transmit — perhaps ; but not 
the mental and moral mastery. The resolute 
millionaire may for himself successfully resist 
the corroding influences of overmuch money 
and power ; but how hard for the second gen- 
eration to escape Newport and nonentity ! 

Such a balancing, however, of the good 
and evil in our civilization helps very little 
toward a settlement of the old dispute between 
optimist and pessimist. But the attitude of 
our world toward these uncompromising facts 
is vastly significant. Men have labored, and 
prayed, and waited for a better civilization. 
Betterment has come ; but betterment coin- 
cident with and partly depending upon great 
complexity, a complexity which has led to 
moral confusion and threatens disaster. Our 
age has recognized this confusion, but it has 

9 



The Higher Education and Progress 

not despaired. The biologization of society 
and civilization it sees is purely fanciful. 
There is no necessary cycle from birth to de- 
cay and death. The analogy, in the case of 
nations which have passed away, is striking ; 
but it is only analogy. It is our privilege to 
trace the causes of decay, not in the nature 
of the organism, but in the laws which were 
violated. We are trying to study and under- 
stand the dangers which accompany our pros- 
perity and which threaten it. The disposition 
of the age — and this is its hopeful sign — is 
to measure well the difficulty and to under- 
take boldly. It is inquiring how physical 
vigor can be preserved, how virtue can be 
made to prevail in the state, how wealth 
can be put to noble uses, how the things 
which deepen and enrich a human life can be 
carried over to those who follow us. Some 
achievements are without alloy. Antiseptic 
surgery ministers only to human weal, and is 
the priceless possession of all who shall come 
after us. Human slavery, if it has not wholly 
come to an end, has lost forever its respecta- 
bility. We do not easily write new Iliads, but 
the old Iliad remains. And between the best 
of Greece and our own civilization are the 
Gospels and Magna Charta, Columbus, Wil- 
berforce, Livingstone, Darwin, Shakspere, 

10 



The Higher Education and Progress 

Dante, Raphael, Paul, and Jesus. True, what 
we are and become cannot be directly be- 
stowed, but DQistakes and achievements are 
both schoolmasters of the race. In the fresh 
page of childhood is the hope of the world. 
Youth is forever the great asset of civiliza- 
tion. And the instrument upon which the 
democratic state must stake its existence and 
its future, the instrument on which the prog- 
ress of society depends, is Education. 

It was nothing short of the inspiration 
of genius which planted the schoolhouse in 
every American community, which rested the 
foundations of the Republic upon the educa- 
tion of every citizen, which set up the Amer- 
ican college in every considerable community. 
This is not the place to speak of what the 
common school has accomplished and of its 
vital relation to the stability of the Republic. 
It has universalized intelligence. It has re- 
sponded to the deep thirst for knowledge char- 
acteristic of American democracy. But com- 
mon school and college and university, fall- 
ing short of adequate service to the state, 
have slowly yielded to new demands and 
new ideals, and are transforming themselves 
before our eyes. Education is of many kinds, 
and training in citizenship does not cease 
when school days are over. But the schools 
11 



The Higher Education and Progress 

have the inspiring advantage of dealing with 
youth and with the intellectual aspect of 
training. It is of these new demands and new 
ideals, particularly as affecting the higher 
education, that I am to speak. 

The college, and in time the university, 
while they kept pace with the march of settle- 
ment, were hardly counted as of or for the 
common man. Free to the aristocracy of in- 
tellect, they existed directly for the elect, 
only very indirectly for the mass. The chosen 
youth, prepared by a long course of mental 
discipline, with trained minds and a good con- 
science, arriving at the portals of the college, 
were to enter in to a favored land where they 
would be shielded from the distracting influ- 
ences of the business and profane world, 
with large leisure for thought and quiet, under 
the guidance of wise teachers, with four golden, 
protected years in which to train the reason, 
develop the taste and imagination, polish and 
perfect the intellectual powers. The Greek 
had conceived of knowledge as the highest 
good — not meaning by knowledge mere in- 
tellectual dexterity, nor acquaintance with 
facts, but the highest cultivation of the facul- 
ties, the knowledge which gave poise, sanity, 
judgment, wisdom, which refined the taste and 
cultivated the imagination. It was the pas- 
12 



The Higher Education and Progress 

sionate thesis of Greek philosophy that no 
one would willingly do wrong, that knowing 
the good one would not, could not, choose the 
evil. The American college adopted the 
Greek ideal of intellectual development, fol- 
lowing it somewhat haltingly, it is true, and 
endeavoring to add, for the transmutation 
of knowledge into virtue, the profession and 
practice of the Christian religion. College 
graduates, with the stamp of culture upon 
them, were then to proceed to the profes- 
sional schools, there to be fitted to become 
the doctors, preachers, and lawyers of the 
world, to occupy the chief positions of influ- 
ence and responsibility, to make the laws, 
to administer justice, to write the books, to 
interpret the ways of God to man. How far 
short of its own ideal the college fell, how 
the husks of grammar and the niceties of logic 
caricatured this culture and failed to fuse 
it with character, the college graduate of half 
a century ago can tell. But at its worst, as 
well as at its best, it claimed four years of 
youth, and in those four years there was time 
for much besides grammar and hair-splitting. 
The time apart, the association with one's 
fellows, the saturation, to some extent at 
least, with the best that had been known 
and thought in the world, the influence of 

13 



The Higher Education and Progress 

great-hearted men, redeemed the inadequacy 
of curriculum and teaching. All honor to the 
American college for what it did ! That the 
work-a-day world felt little or no dependence 
upon the college-trained man, that in the 
business world he was distanced by the ap- 
prentice, did not trouble the college. It was 
not supposed that the higher education was 
especially for the business man, or that it 
would fit him to do his particular work. In- 
deed it was the pride of the college, as distin- 
guished from the professional school, that it 
was divorced from utilitarian needs, that it 
had nothing to do with the merely useful. 
For the elect the goal must be culture, than 
which there is none higher. Culture is the 
necessary prerequisite to professional life, the 
sign and seal of the educated man ; but the 
mere business of the world must be done by 
the common man who gets his training, not in 
college, not in any school, but in his business. 
A new country, thinly populated, with vast 
unexplored and unexploited riches, and a 
thrifty and enterprising population, is pro- 
tected from most of the evils of a high state of 
civilization. Its strength is in the self- 
reliance, the sturdiness and independence of 
its citizens, its wealth of opportunity, which 
forbids the closing of the door upon any 

14 



The Higher Education and Progress 

citizen's independent living. With that age 
passing for America, with no more broad and 
fertile prairies to assimilate the surplus home 
population and the stream of immigration, 
with the balance of power passing from coun- 
try to city, with humanity congested, with 
great wealth and great poverty jostling each 
other, with class divisions becoming pro- 
nounced, with the proletariat beginning to 
arrive, with the strong grasp of Puritanism 
relaxed, the inadequacy of the old humanistic 
training to meet the needs of the state becomes 
evident. Democracy must seriously take 
stock of its resources and prepare to fight for 
its own preservation ; and of these resources 
its schools are first in importance. 

The first reconstruction came in an enlarge- 
ment of the avenues to culture. The human- 
ities, it was contended, did not exhaust the 
subjects of human interest, and through other 
studies the powers of the mind might be devel- 
oped, the taste and imagination refined. One 
by one as the modern languages, science, his- 
tory, economics, and the others made their 
demand for recognition in the college cur- 
riculum, they were challenged on the ground 
of lack of culture value. They accepted the 
challenge, and a furious controversy followed. 
In the end they were admitted to the sacred 

15 



The Higher Education and Progress 

curriculum, grudgingly at first, but their ad- 
mission justified on the ground that they had 
won their case, their culture value was dem- 
onstrated. How vastly the higher education 
gained by this infusion of new subjects and 
by the scientific method which accompanied 
them, and which was also applied to the old 
subjects, is now a matter of common agree- 
ment. 

But this movement, far-reaching and benefi- 
cent as it has been, was only a beginning. 
Democracy has been a long time in becoming 
democratic. It was the old idea even for a 
democracy that the masses were to spontan- 
eously choose wise leaders, or to be per- 
suaded, by whatever artifice was necessary, 
to accept those clearly pointed out by reason 
of their training and wisdom. The masses 
were to be rustic, ingenuous, deferential, look- 
ing up for direction to specially trained supe- 
riors. Almost with a savage suddenness we 
have seen this ideal rejected. Suddenly dem- 
ocracy has become all of us, choosing its own 
kind to be its instruments and leaders. Rank, 
crude, coarse, with its brawling journalism, 
its tawdry rhetoric, its brutal politics, its 
coarse amusements, its rag-time literature, 
it is still the majority become conscious that 
it is the majority. The mantle of authorita- 
16 



The Higher Education and Progress 

tive leadership has fallen from the old learned 
professions. The business world, on the one 
hand, with its enormous enterprises and its 
quickly gathered wealth, the workingman 
on the other, with his highly centralized or- 
ganization and newly achieved solidarity, 
both formerly quite without the pale of the 
higher education, have ceased to look up very 
much for direction to culture. There is very 
little holding the ear to the ground to catch 
what the aristocracy of learning has to say. 
It is no longer worth while to tender to this 
majority ready-made leaders of a superior 
brand. Only those will be received as lead- 
ers who are able to lead. College men have 
made their way under these new conditions 
by playing the demagogue and forgetting the 
ideals of the cloister, or through a rude 
awakening and painful readjustment, or else 
by virtue of a training which has fitted them 
to grasp effectively the problems of today and 
press them toward solution. Democracy must 
accept its majority, and there is hope for its 
future only as there is the possibility of effec- 
tive training and advancing ideals for all its 
citizens. How shall the training necessary to 
independence and wise citizenship be brought 
within the reach of all ? 

The idea of education as a direct training 
17 



The Higher Education and Progress 

and fitting for the work-a-day world is pretty 
foreign to all orthodox conception and seems 
to contrast sharply with the venerated culture 
ideal. The education which the common school 
gave — a knowledge of the three '*R's" with 
some acquaintance with grammar, geography, 
and the outline facts of history, was primarily 
^ process of mental discipline. This elemen- 
tary mental training was for the majority 
of its citizens not only all that the State could 
afford to give, but all that its citizens could 
need or make use of. If intended for the 
ranks of unskilled labor, they went early to 
their tasks with the ability to read and write 
and cipher too, perhaps ; if ambitious to fill 
places requiring skill, they entered upon the 
necessary apprenticeship, or, in the day of 
easy opportunity, set up for themselves. For 
those of presumably larger mental develop- 
ment, whose ambitions were aroused, whose 
parents could afford it or whose resources 
could compass it, there followed the high 
school, which further developed the mental 
powers, broadened the outlook, and so made 
possible apprenticeship for larger undertak- 
ings. At the apex stood the college with its 
finer discipline and final arrival of the select 
few at the paradise of culture. 

Whether it was the observation that this 
18 



Tlie Higher Education and Progress 

mental training was making small impress 
upon a great mass of coming citizens, whether 
the conviction that this culture was too often 
a veneer in no way transmuted into virtue 
and character, whether its relative ineflBciency 
compared with the demands of a modern 
world was too glaring, whether for alarm 
for its own preservation and the progress of 
civilization, whatever the precipitating cause, 
triumphant democracy has emphatically re- 
jected this ideal, and rejected it, as it believes, 
in the interests of a larger and better civiliza- 
tion. Because the success of America has 
been so great, because there is such mastery 
of material conditions, such daring for the 
future, such possibilities in the midst of great 
■dangers, the State has turned to education as 
the conserving, uplifting force in the progress 
of civilization. The schools must become a 
larger factor in the life of society, and furn- 
ish a larger equipment for the practical duties 
-of life. The school years are the years in 
which character and capacity are fixed. To- 
morrow is bound up with today ; it will be to 
a large extent what the schools make it. 
Every citizen of the republic is entitled, dur- 
ing his formative years, to all the preliminary 
training for citizenship he can acquire and 
assimilate. And the State, in its generous 
19 



The Higher Education and Progress 

proviBion for education, must have in mind 
the best preparation for, and the most direct 
connection which can be made with, the life 
he is to live. Character, power, efficiency — 
this three-fold purpose must run through all 
education. 

Two questions at once arise. Is the higher 
education, then, to be imposed upon every- 
body ? And is it, after all, only utilitarian 
training for the shop, the farm, and the 
counting-room ? Is the pure search for knowl- 
edge, the lofty idealism, the life of the Bpirit 
to be degraded to the base uses of trade and 
money-getting ? Are we to be a nation of 
engineers, shopkeepers only ? Granted that 
the old curriculum was not varied enough 
to meet the needs of everybody : we have en- 
larged it by the addition of other and varied 
subjects of human interest. Is the age utili- 
tarian, absorbed in money-getting ? Shall 
we not hold high the torch of culture ? Shall 
we not emphasize the things of the spirit ? 
Must not the university with its leisure and 
philosophic calm oppose the rush, the worry, 
the vulgarity of modern life? To open and en- 
large the mind, to saturate it with the classics 
of literature and philosophy, to withdraw 
contemplation from the practical, every-day 
aspect of the world, to imbed the student in 

20 



The Higher Education and Progress 

an atmosphere where not much that is useful 
is taught, to prepare a place apart, a kingdom 
of the mind to which the later man of affairs 
may retire for refreshment and renewal — 
ought not this to be the high aim of the col- 
lege and the university ? Shall we not say, 
First the time apart, the cloister, the develop- 
ment of the taste and imagination ; after that 
as much training for professional work as 
time and opportunity permit ? "We believe," 
says the president of Williams College in his 
last annual report, "that a college should 
not become simply a preparatory department 
for the professional schools, but should claim 
for the full course in Liberal Arts, and for its 
appropriate degree, an independent dignity 
and worth. . . . Science must be given its 
rightful place of honor, and the scientific 
method must be understood, welcomed, and 
adopted. The New Humanities, such as the 
modern languages, economics, and govern- 
ment must have their place, and the college 
must be kept in vital touch with living 
questions of patriotism and the great en- 
thusiasms of humanity. At the same time 
we all believe in the unique value of the 
full classical training. Certainly if we are 
to cultivate here the highest literary taste 
and form, if we are to secure precision and 

21 



The Higher Education and Progress 

elegance of style as a characteristic of Wil- 
liams men, we can not afford to neglect Greek. 
. . . If the trend under the new curriculum 
is too much away from the humanities, it, 
and not the humanities, must be set aside." 

It may be that in forming for itself a new 
ideal of education based upon social need, the 
State has seemed sometimes to emphasize un- 
duly its utilitarian character. It may be thai 
proportion and sequence have sometimes been 
lost sight of. But in saying that democracy 
has rejected the culture ideal as the end of 
education we are merely insisting that it 
has passed on to a larger conception of the 
value of human life and of the possibilities 
of its development. Indeed, if we accept 
Matthew Arnold's definition of culture as 
*^vital knowledge," we may dismiss at once all 
controversy which the term has engendered : 
only our conception of the function and field 
of the higher education is immensely enlarged* 

But here again we meet with contradiction. 
In spite of the large infusion of new subjects, 
in spite of the "vital touch with living ques- 
tions of patriotism and the great enthusiasms 
of humanity," it is becoming the fashion to 
doubt whether education is the panacea it is 
claimed to be, and to wonder if there are not 
already too many men and women seeking the 

22 



The Higher Education and Progress 

universities and unfitting thenaselves for plain 
tasks on their own particular levels. Valu- 
able as culture is held to be in and for itself, 
it somehow dissolves in contact with the 
street-car conductor's punch. The overcrowd- 
ing of the professions, the struggling law- 
yers and doctors, the unsuccessful teachers, 
the bewildered scholars, the misfits and fail- 
ures everywhere among college graduates 
seem to bear out the contention that not only 
the cultivation of the taste and imagination, 
but the practical training of science and gov- 
ernment, and even scholarship as well, has its 
limitations. 

It may be freely conceded that there are 
too many young men and young women press- 
ing into our colleges and universities. They 
have been sent by parents who did not un- 
derstand the university, or who, having 
means, followed the fashion, or who did not 
know what else to do with their children's 
time, or who regarded the university, alas, 
as a reformatory. These recruits come list- 
lessly, without any real preparation of the 
heart, not gripped by any great purpose, 
thinking merely of good times and college 
pranks, or, it may be, with the fair asset of 
youth already squandered. There are tests 
which weed out those who do not roughly 

23 



The Higher Education and Progress 

measure up to some prearranged intellectual 
standard. Alas that character tests are not 
more effective, that the unfit are not rigidly 
turned back before the corrosion of their pres- 
ence has wrought its untold mischief I The 
university is equipped for its special purpose. 
It is possible for it, by means of cumbrous 
machinery, by large expenditure of effort, by 
an occasional and almost accidental contact 
with the springs of action, to reclaim the 
wayward and convert the vicious. But it is 
too costly and wasteful a process — not only 
in the effort spent, but in the demoralization 
and lowering of standards which the tolera- 
tion of slovenliness, shamming, and dissipa- 
tion involves. There are reformatories with 
better adaptation for the kind of work here 
needed. Policemen are out of place in a 
university. But the university must deliver 
itself from the morally disintegrated and 
from the idler. The higher education must 
remain for the elect — but always the self- 
elected — those prepared in heart and mind 
and who come to it as to a joyful task. There 
cannot be too much eflSciency in the world, 
there cannot be too many of the elect coming 
up to the universities. The world guarantees 
no salaried positions, and is shy of its gifts to 
those whose conception of education does not 
24 



The Higher Education and Progress 

rise above place-hunting. But self-reliance 
and the mastery of some good tool will al- 
ways land their possessor on his feet, and if 
by some freak of a usually wise world he finds 
himself in a humble place, the place is dig- 
nified and not he degraded. 

It is a familiar commonplace that just the 
atmosphere of the cloister and the intimate 
associations of the four years are of more 
importance than all the formal instruction 
which the college can give. The stricter truth 
is that atmosphere and association condition 
all the college work. The impulse which 
turns the whole life, the touch which opens 
unseeing eyes, may and often does come from 
this stimulating air and these fortuitous asso- 
ciations. But if the college has taken any- 
thing like its rightful place, these are but 
portals leading into the treasure-house of 
learning. It is pardonable in after-dinner 
reminiscence of far-away times to dwell upon 
the externa], the chance situation, the bur- 
lesque. But the man who seriously looking 
back upon his four years of college life sees 
in it chiefly his fraternity, athletics, college 
pranks or dissipations confesses to having 
missed that which was chiefly worth the get- 
ting and which alone justifies the college's 
existence. There is much unconsidered talk 

25 



The Higher Education and Progress 

about treating college youth as men. The 
important point is how they treat themselves. 
College students who hold themselves stead- 
ily as men and women thereby become enti- 
tled to every consideration which obtains 
among men and women. The college inter- 
poses no hindrances. For them is the high 
privilege of undivided and unimpeded cooper- 
ation with the vital process of training. For 
the most part, however, the university is 
summoned to promote, at its most important 
and most difficult stage, the tremendous task 
of making men out of boys. The university 
cannot escape its responsibility by any fine 
theory of being concerned only with the 
presentation of subjects, which the student can 
take or leave as he chooses. Twenty and op- 
portunity is a far greater asset than sixty and 
millions. It is too much to expect youth to 
see this obvious bit of maturer wisdom, but 
it is none the less incumbent upon the univer- 
sity to do what it can to avert the incredible 
folly of throwing away this unrenewable 
inheritance. Fortunately the course of the 
university is simple. It does not look for the 
sustained gravity of mature manhood ; it 
no longer feels it necessary to suppress the 
rebellious mood natural to youth ; fun and 
exuberance are its good allies. But the uni- 
26 



The Higher Education and Progress 

versity can meet and catch the entering fresh- 
man with a gripping task, it can surround 
him with the fragrance of learning and with 
the freshening breath of high purpose in the 
accomplishment of definite things, and it can 
hold to unflinching standards. 

As helps in accelerating this passage over 
very thin ice — the transition from immatur- 
ity to self-control and mastery — there is no 
doubt that two of the great discoveries of 
modern higher education are athletics and 
co-education. Co-education, more than any 
other one thing, discovers to the hoodlum and 
the evil-minded that they have arrived at the 
wrong place. Frank comradeship is the sov- 
ereign antidote to boorishness, to sentimen- 
tality on the one side and disloyalty on the 
other. Athletics, in spite of the severe strain 
which is put upon the athletic hero, in spite 
of the mock heroics with which we surround 
intercollegiate sports, in spite of the all toa 
vicarious character of much athletic activity,. 
— athletics is still among the wholesome, 
clarifying, manly-making influences of the 
university. 

Does progress, then, mean more plows, 
more steamships, more trolleys, larger cities, 
greater enterprises and greater success in 
them ? Now it is not the purpose of the 

27 



The Higher Education and Progress 

higher education to frown upon enterprise. It 
will promote enterprise by equipping men 
with decision, with courage, with power. If 
the higher education prepares you to earn 
your living and your independence in straight- 
forward, honest, capable fashion, by doing a 
task which the world wants done and for 
which it is willing to pay, it has done well. 
*' In this world," writes Theodore Roosevelt, 
"*' the one thing supremely worth having is the 
opportunity, coupled with the capacity, to do 
well and worthily a piece of work the doing 
of which is of vital consequence to the welfare 
of mankind." But the promotion of enter- 
prise is not everything. The higher educa- 
tion does not dissipate its resources by at- 
tempting what belongs to the shop and the 
farm. Democracy has rejected a culture not 
based upon high seriousness and co-existing 
with vapidity of character and an inverte- 
brate will ; but it has no quarrel with a schol- 
arship that is real, nor with the humanities 
that really make the connection between 
knowledge and virtue. In our day, with its 
lack of reverence for dogmatics and its 
intolerance of cant, a layer of religion cannot 
be added on to culture to do this work. To 
be merely religious is to be merely useless, 
lor religion can work only in what is vital and 

28 



The Higher Education and Progress 

alive. Democracy can also believe in the 
" unique value of the full classical training " 
— because it believes in the unique value of 
many another training which brings youth 
and reality into intimate and loving touch. 
The essence of the higher education is not 
in its pursuit of precision and elegance of 
style, any more than in its pursuit of super- 
intendencies in the railway service : but the- 
one as legitimately as the other. Education 
must have in mind more than precision and 
elegance on the one hand and more than a 
salaried position on the other — by-products, 
as it were. Education proceeds on the plan of 
a more efficient man playing his part in the 
life of the community and of the state. The 
higher education exemplifies the fine right 
and duty, for every man and woman who can 
compass it, of prolonging the years of train- 
ing that the life may be worthier, the service 
better. Democracy asks the university to 
touch human activity everywhere with the 
university ideal — with mastery consecrated 
to service. The higher education is as much 
of engineering and agriculture, of music and 
the fine arts, as it is of the humanities, o! 
science, of history, of government. There is 
a stimulation, a gain in effectiveness, in hav- 
ing all these varied educational divisio ns 

29 



The Higher Education and Progress 

included in a single foundation. Poverty of 
resources usually forbids this. But in selec- 
ting different fields, let not one institution 
esteem itself better than another unless it 
more effectively trains men and women for 
wise and useful living. The future of the 
small college is undecided : it is secure so 
long as whatever it does is genuine and genu- 
inely responds to the needs of a higher civil- 
ization. Must we say that precision and 
elegance are to come first and agriculture and 
engineering afterward, lest there be no large 
vision ? With four of the choicest years of 
youth, in the companionship and under the 
instruction of men worthy of such tasks, gain- 
ing mastery of real problems and ascending 
to wider and wider outlooks, are we still 
afraid of arriving only in Philistia? 

America has learned pretty well how to 
do things ; the time has come when it needs 
to emphasize the things worth doing. The 
higher education must promote, not merely 
in the so-called learned professions, but 
throughout the world of enterprise, that large- 
ness of view which leads to a recognition of 
values and that courage which comes from 
seeing life steadily and whole. America 
stands squarely for the Open Door. Is our 
interest mere solicitude for the American 

30 



The Higher Education and Progress 

merchant and trader, or are the real interests 
of China and civilization a part of our con- 
cern ? In California we are very busy dis- 
playing our resources. What is it that our 
promotion committees are chiefly promoting ? 
Is it a million-peopled San Francisco that we 
should chiefly desire, or is it to make a city 
safer and sweeter to live in, less responsive 
to the yellow newspaper and the demagogue ? 
Mr. James Bryce, keenest of observers and 
most sympathetic of critics, seeing our cease- 
less rush, our grasping at the future, the pas- 
sion to bring about in a lifetime what the 
past took centuries to accomplish, was moved 
to exclaim : " Why in heaven's name this 
haste ? You have time enough. No enemy 
threatens you. No volcano will rise from be- 
neath you. Why sacrifice the present to the 
future, fancying you will be happier when 
your fields teem with wealth and your cities 
with people ? In Europe we have cities 
wealthier and more populous than yours, 
and we are not happy. Why do things rudely 
and ill which need to be done well, seeing 
that the welfare of your descendants may 
turn upon them ? Why in your hurry to sub- 
due and utilize Nature, squander her splen- 
did gifts ? Why allow the noxious weeds 
of Eastern politics to take root in your soil, 

31 



The Higher Education and Progress 

when by a little effort you might keep it 
pure ? Why hasten the advent of that 
threatening day when the vast spaces of 
the continent shall all have been filled, 
and the poverty or discontent of the older 
states shall find no outlet ? You have oppor- 
tunities such as mankind never had before, 
and may never have again. Your work is 
great and noble : it is done for a future 
larger and vaster than our conceptions can 
embrace. Why not make its outlines and be- 
ginnings worthy of these destinies, the thought 
of which gilds your hopes and elevates your 
purposes ? " 

Progress is a moral event ; and life is a 
joint undertaking. The interrelation of so- 
ciety is beyond recall : if one member suffer 
all the members suffer. We cannot undo the 
complexity, but in the common experience 
and the common service life may be in some 
real way unified. Not complexity, but artifi- 
ciality and consequent decay of moral fiber 
have been the undoing of nations. Life must 
be complex, but it need not be artificial. 
God's desire for us is possible for us — pos- 
sible in the masterful daring of youth full- 
armed and untainted. The cloister and the 
desert may clarify the vision, arm the under- 
standing, strengthen the purpose while yet it 

32 



The Higher Education and Progress 

is morning ; they may become a temporary 
refuge in the burning heat of the day. But 
the world we work in is not of the desert or 
the high mountains. We shall not be judged 
by our success in retired places and among 
cloudcapped peaks, but by how we make for 
manhood and sainthood in the world of men 
and things. The mistake of all our Utopias 
has been the trying to make life too easy. 
Life is up-hill work, and is not to be con- 
quered on other terms. To be sincere, to be 
courageous, to keep faith and fineness of 
temper, not to give in when life surprises us 
by becoming hard, and to keep going on — 
this is the only road to any Utopia worth 
the having. 

After all, the Greek was right. At the gate 
of manhood, with clean-lived youth behind, 
with the poise of mastery and the vision that 
comes from full-rounded knowledge, man 
will not willingly do wrong. This is the 
truth that makes free, the alchemy that trans- 
mutes knowledge into virtue. The whole 
structure of society is built upon this prin- 
ciple. All the race has accomplished in its 
long ascent, all its hope for the future, all the 
plan of God, is staked on this divine response 
of the human soul. The educated man's bur- 
den is that he is educated, that he holds his 

33 



The Higher Education and Progress 

own self-respect only on the rigid terms of 
absolute sincerity, that for him baseness and 
power are forever incompatible. 

If the twentieth century shows little interest 
in abstract Utopias, if tbe happy Republic, 
the government without problems, seems only 
a ^'far-off, divine event," too intangible for a 
present program, there is compensation in tha 
knighthood which our own fresh contact with 
reality, our genuine passion for sincerity and 
for usefulness, is surely developing. The 
modern Knight of the Order of Progress rides 
no foam-crested steed 'gainst windmill or 
castle moat. Armed with knowledge become 
virtue he does his piece of honest work in the 
world, and in the doing it helps to right the 
wrong everywhere. 

" Musical, 
Tremulous, impressional. 
Alive to gentle influence 
Of landscape and of sky, 
And tender to the spirit-touch 
Of man's or maiden's eye : 
But, to his native centre fast. 
Shall into Future fuse the Past, 
And the world's flowing fates in hi» 
own mould recast." 



34 



rm: 



